John le Carre Quotes & Sayings (Page 8)

“If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.”

“There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.”

“To give the best of the day to your work is most important.”

“Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within.”

“I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself.”

“Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.”

“I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.”

“People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.”

“I do believe very much in movie as a one-man-show. I think that where I've watched movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.”

“I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.”